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- Convenors:
-
Monika Freier
(Max Planck Institute for Human Development)
Jana Tschurenev (ETH Zürich)
- Location:
- C302
- Start time:
- 26 July, 2012 at
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
- Session slots:
- 3
Short Abstract:
What educational approaches were considered helpful to install ethics in children? How could adults be turned into moral subjects? The presentations in this panel address these questions by investigating the history of formal and informal education in colonial South Asia.
Long Abstract:
This panel offers a broad perspective on the history of moral education in modern India against the background of colonial knowledge and the global circulation of educational ideas. On the one hand, it focuses on different efforts to provide moral education in schools and kindergartens. Instructing children in ethical principles and the proper code of conduct is an important element in many pedagogical approaches and educational institutions. The panel analyses the complex objectives and different meanings of children's moral education, as well as the pedagogical technologies and institutional settings which were employed to achieve those objectives. Matching insights from the history of schooling with studies on literary sources, the panel on the other hand explores the agenda and technologies of moral education for adults. It analyses how different literary genres such as advice books or novels aimed to promote standards of ethics and etiquette, challenged or creatively reformulated notions of proper conduct in the world. In many ways literature contained implicit and explicit pedagogical agendas to shape the mind, feelings and body of the reader and thus also to reform the community or society at large. While notions of "character", ethics or personality development were often framed in universalistic terms as applying to human beings in general, efforts to morally educate people were linked to the promotion and negotiation of gender norms, class identities, as well as national identities.
Session 1, "Reforming pedagogy", focuses on three international pedagogical models, the so-called "monitorial system of education" in the early nineteenth century, the Froebelian "kindergarten system" and anthroposophist "Waldorf pedagogy" and points at important shifts in the techniques employed to morally educate children. Session 2, "Moral education for the home and nation", looks at efforts to reform the "inner world", including household, domesticity, and parenting practices, and their deployment in the formation of class identities. Exploring advice literature for women and women's writings, it analyses contrasting norms and models of femininity.Session 3, "Colonial education and the formation of male leadership" analyses gendered notions of proper conduct, particularly focusing on the connection of ethics and masculinity. Important concepts are social virtue and entrepreneurship as well as the central notion of "character".
Accepted papers:
Session 1Jana Tschurenev (ETH Zürich)
Paper short abstract:
The paper analyses some pedagogical technologies introduced in early 19th century elementary schools, contrasting schools set up for "the poor" in Britain with those promoted by missionaries and educational reformers in Bengal. How were schools to function as "moral and intellectual machines"?
Paper long abstract:
In the early nineteenth century, educational reformers in Britain as well as India designed schools as "moral and intellectual machines" for reshaping the minds of the working class at home and the colonial subjects abroad. This paper analyses the new educational technologies which aimed to serve that purpose, especially the introduction of copy-books. It thereby raises questions of how exactly educators tried to pursue their moralizing agenda, how the new technologies of schooling - which crucially shaped the repertoire of modern schooling until today - were supposed to work, and how they might have worked in reality.
Avril Powell (SOAS (University of London))
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on Froebelian ideas on moral education as transmitted to colonial India through the London-based Froebel Society itself, but also through its links with some newly founded pressure groups concerned with Indian education, notably Mary Carpenter’s National Indian Association.
Paper long abstract:
In the 1860s and 1870s several movements recently founded in Britain and India had among their objectives the improvement of Indian education, especially for girls. That the Froebel Society for the Promotion of the Kindergarten System (formed in London in 1874) shared these 'Indian' interests has so far received little attention. The paper traces some links between advocacy of Froebelian ideas on the nurturing of morality during early childhood and some wider debates on female education in which some new discussion groups, founded shortly before or after the Froebel Society itself, were currently engaging. These included the Kensington Society (urging women's suffrage and access to higher education), some Social Science societies (both in Britain and Bengal), and most significant and long-lived in the context of Indian education, the National Indian Association (NIA), founded by Mary Carpenter in 1870. Unsurprisingly, the same names reoccur among the early activists of these education-orientated groups and much information on both the adaptation of Froebelian ideas to India and on the agendas of the National Indian Association for female education is found in the administrative correspondence and conference papers of one Adelaide Manning (Carpenter's successor as secretary of the NIA until 1905, and also the Froebel Society's first secretary and later vice-president). Attention is paid too to some British females who lectured on Froebelian principles and practices while teaching in India, and to some Indians (the most well-known being Ramabai), who introduced Froebelian methods into Indian kindergartens.
Maria Moritz
Paper short abstract:
While many papers in the panel investigate pedagogical import from Europe to colonial South Asia this paper focuses on the inspiration from South Asian ethical concepts such as reincarnation on one of the most successful progressive educational projects of Europe and beyond - Waldorf pedagogy. Through its links with the global theosophical milieu Waldorf pedagogy was inspired by South Asian spiritual concepts which shaped a pedagogical agenda for educating head, heart and hand of the students and thereby aimed at producing a sense of global solidarity and tolerance.
Paper long abstract:
As a prominent member of the Theosophical Society, German radical reformist Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) was inspired by the society's holistic pedagogical concept that merged Asian spiritual terminology such as reincarnation with modern findings in child education in order to help the new generation to cope with the new era e.g. its rapid urbanization, globalization and world wars. The hope to advance a global consciousness through moral education and thus prevent future violence was of central importance to Waldorf pedagogy. The major platform for progressive educationists from all over the globe such as John Dewey as Maria Montessori which institutionalized these attempts was the New Education Fellowship and its main organ New Education for a New Era founded 1921 by the British theosophist Beatrice Ensor. The paper asks in how far Steiner adopted the pedagogical ideas of the global theosophical network that manifested in the Central Hindu College in Benares (1898) and the St. Christopher School in Letchworth (1915) - the first-ever garden city. Not only the global resources of Steiner's pedagogical ideas but also his hopes for global tolerance through education will be closely examined.
Monika Freier (Max Planck Institute for Human Development)
Paper short abstract:
Advice literature in India aimed at morally educating its readers while negotiating 'modern' value systems. My paper examines the colonial setting of the genre and explores how the teachings of these books establish national, educational, and gender-related moral codes.
Paper long abstract:
The first half of the twentieth century saw a rise in Hindi advice books, which were often modeled on best-selling English advice literature. Books on the formation of character, such 'Self-help' by Samuel Smiles, emphasized the importance of individual improvement and emotional control. In order to reach out to the literate Hindi-speaking audience, Indians translated, adapted, and creatively re-wrote these books. They proposed that education and the internalization of behavioral and emotional norms would facilitate a moral transformation of the individual as well as the entire society. In negotiating ethics and etiquette, the books address what it means to be modern, educated, and Indian.
My paper critically discusses the role of advice literature as a pedagogical tool used in adult education. For this, I am briefly introducing the development of the genre in connection with the colonial 'civilizing mission'. I then look at the content of the books, which predominantly address a male audience, but advise on how both men and women should act, think, and feel. Finally, I discuss the connections between normative texts and processes of community building in the context of late colonial India and how advice literature can be used as a historical source.
Leigh Denault (Churchill College, Cambridge)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines Hindi texts on the family, household, and education to explore the creation of new social, political and religious identities in 19th c. North India.
Paper long abstract:
Many scholars have focused on education initiatives beginning with late nineteenth-century reform movements, but analyses of what Sudhir Kakar famously designated the 'inner world' of the family, and the changing social, political and cultural meanings of childhood in India, have been comparatively few. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the decline of certain household-based apprenticeship schemes and older patronage networks forced aspiring families to make radical changes to the ways in which they invested in their children's education. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries movements to promote female education and to press for the rights of adult sons in the context of the extended family household also affected how childhood and adulthood were viewed in a larger social context. Through an analysis of new educational, religious and social ideas emerging in Hindi texts across the nineteenth century, I will explore how legal reform and the diffusion of new parenting ideals became closely tied to the reproduction of certain gendered caste and class values, and thus to the creation of new experiences of family relationships and social networks.
Barnita Bagchi (Utrecht University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses literary sources, by women writing in Bengali, c.1920-1960, which offered far more complex, heterogeneous, innovative, and creative strategies for the shaping, reform, and moral education of subjects, than have hitherto been recognized. Authors focused on include Rokeya Hossain, Ashapurna Devi, and Lila Majumdar.
Paper long abstract:
This paper analyses literary sources, by women writing in Bengali, c.1920-1960, which offered far more complex, heterogeneous, innovative, and creative strategies for the shaping, reform, and moral education of subjects, than have hitherto been recognized. Authors focused on include Rokeya Hossain, Ashapurna Devi, and Lila Majumdar. 'Moral education' and 'reform' have tended to carry with them a stereotypical aura of sententiousness, didacticism, humourlessness, and aridness. I argue, utilizing tools from literary, historical, and as gender studies, that polemical and fictional writing by Bengali women writers such as Rokeya, Ashapurna, and Lila repay attention to their stylistic fertility, their ability to craft and reinvent humour, and their creative reinvention of genres. The projects of reform and moral education of subjects (not only female ones) that emerge from such writing are nuanced, multilayered, subversive, and wickedly intelligent.
Christina Oesterheld (South Asia Institute Heidelberg)
Paper short abstract:
The paper is dedicated to a book on the exemplary career of a Muslim male by the famous novelist Mirza Rusva (1857-1931). His "Sharif zada" (A man of noble birth) was written in 1900 and is a very detailed fictional account of the happy and contended l life of a man who adopts the new social virtues and turns into a successful enterpreneur. His success in life already suffices to illustrate the usefulness of the new values, nevertheless the message is also brought home in a number of reflexions of the main protagonist and in his discussions with the author/narrator.
Paper long abstract:
In the second half of the nineteenth century, new forms and new criteria of moral education came into being under the influence of the colonial presence and social changes in Indian society. The bulk of this advice literature in Urdu was concerned with the reform and education of women, comparatively less space was devoted to the moral education of man. For many readers it may be rather surprising that Mirza Rusva (1857-1931) who is mostly known for his novel "Umrao Jan Ada" and who wrote an impressive number of detective novels also produced a remarkable guidebook for a successful life in the new era. His "Sharif zada" (A man of noble birth, 1900) is perhaps the most comprehensive and consistent fictional account of a man's exemplary career. It comprises all new bourgeois virtues but also exhibits the ideal of an active, productive and enterprising life which would hardly be found in any other work of the same period. One of exceptional features of the book is the value it attaches to manual, bodily labour and its engagement with agriculture. As in "Umrao Jan Ada", the author's fictional alter ego appears as narrator and interlocutor, thus providing the opportunity to discuss cultural and social values.
The book remained part of the school syllabus until the middle of the twentieth century and thus can be regarded as quite influential.
Razak Khan (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen)
Paper short abstract:
The rhetoric of ´´backward native states´´ provided new ground for colonial projects of reform through education. This paper locates such efforts in the post-1857 period and analyses shifts in the colonial discourse and practices around princely education by focusing on two Nawabs of Rampur.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines colonial discourses and practices regarding education of princely state rulers. My paper focuses on the education of two Nawabs of Rampur, Hamid Ali Khan (1889-1930) and Raza Ali Khan (1930-49). It does so by looking at early efforts to set a curriculum in order to raise enlightened princes through English tutors and travel to Europe. Nawab Hamid Ali Khan's travelogue of Europe provides fascinating details of education through travel and its impact. This generated debates regarding education and also about the kind of ruler people wanted- an anglicized enlightened monarch or an informed native ruler familiar with the people and their aspirations. What constituted a good ruler was his rootedness in local traditions. The colonial officials also worried about anglicized rulers out of touch with the conditions in their own states. Subsequently, under Curzonian vision the anglicized Indian, just like the indianized Englishmen, were seen as 'hybrids of an unnatural kind''. Simultaneously, efforts were made by colonial official from the military and education department to educate princes through regulated life at residential educational institutions within India. The paper will focus on the educational reform project at Rajkumar college in Rajkot. The college was the first attempt of its kind to implant ''manly tone and corporate spirit'' of the English public school among native aristocracy. The paper examines the curriculum and education system of the college in order to understand the limits and success of education and character reform under colonialism.